Caterpillar, Chrysalis and Butterfly

An Autoethnographic Account on

Learning to Dance Salsa

Esmee Willemse

2

Caterpillar, Chrysalis and Butterfly

An Autoethnographic Account on Learning to Dance Salsa

A thesis submitted to the University Utrecht in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree Master in Cultural Anthropology: Multiculturalism in Comparative

Perspective.

August 2013

Author Esmee Willemse

Student number 3463141

Supervisor dr. mr. Katrien Klep

Contact details E.Willemse1@students.uu.nl

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*

This thesis is an expression of gratitude

to everyone who taught me to dance

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Contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Chapter one Interlude ................................................................................................................................................. 10

An autoethnographic approach ..................................................................................... 10

Research on movement ................................................................................. 10

Autoethnography and the self .................................................................... 11

The issue of subjectivity and data gathering ........................................ 13

Dance floor settings ............................................................................................................ 15

Chapter two Exposition of the CATERPILLAR ................................................................................................ 19

The habitus of salsa dancing ........................................................................................... 20

First intervention of the CATERPILLAR ..................................................................... 23

Salsa technique training.................................................................................................... 23

Dance techniques, muscle memory and kinesthetic responses ....................... 25

The mirror and the self ..................................................................................................... 27

Second intervention of the CATERPILLAR ................................................................ 28

Chapter three Development in the CHRYSALIS ............................................................................................ 30

What is movement? (Part one) ...................................................................................... 31

What is movement? (part two) ...................................................................................... 33

First intervention of the CHRYSALIS ........................................................................... 35

Consciousness as quasi-universal and the notion of duende ............................ 36

Consciousness as movement and I-Thou relations ............................................... 39

Second intervention of the CHRYSALIS ...................................................................... 40

Chapter four Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY ............................................................................................ 42

The pursuit of happiness .................................................................................................. 43

Transcending Boundaries ................................................................................................ 45

First intervention of the BUTTERFLY ......................................................................... 47

Learning to learn .................................................................................................................. 47

The second intervention of the BUTTERFLY ........................................................... 50

Chapter five Coda .................................................................................................................................................... 51

Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................................................... 53

Appendix one Guidelines in Data Gathering ................................................................................................... 59

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Abstract

This thesis is about a CATERPILLAR, a CHRYSALIS and a BUTTERFLY. These creatures

are both metaphors and acronyms that resemble the ways in which I learned to dance

salsa. Through salsa dancing I gained an entrance to the broader research field on the

question of what it means to be human. Drawing largely from literature in existential

philosophy, -psychology and –anthropology, I explore this question in relation to the

notion of the self and to the learning of techniques. This exploration builds upon the

transformation of the CATERPILLAR (Cultural Actions Trigger Experientially Responsive

Physical Intelligence; Learnt Lived and Recognized) into the CHRYSALIS (Consciousness

Has Rejected Your Self As Limited, Isolated, Separated) and the BUTTERFLY (that has

escaped the Boxes Used To Trap Ego’s Relations For Lamentable Yearnings). The

research insights show that a notion of the self as a bounded entity is hard to sustain.

The self is connected to the wider universe. Self-realization builds upon a recognition

that human beings are movement and that the self is not skin-encapsulated but

connected to the wider universe. At the maximum of self-realization, however, the

human being becomes completely immersed in context and thus loses its sense of self.

Keywords: anthropology, autoethnography, human being, self, salsa dancing

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Introduction

‘We are the beings whose being is in issue. … What we suffer from is life, the peculiar and

vexatious poverty of finite being, vulnerable equally to embody excitations and to

impingements from a threatening world’ (Carrere 2006:168).

The above quote nicely introduces what this thesis is about: it is an exploration of the

question of being human. According to Ingold, ‘the objective of anthropology is … to seek

a generous, comparative but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and

knowing in the one world we all inhabit’ (Ingold 2011:229). This understanding of

anthropology is an important divergence from the epistemological notion of our

discipline as based upon the way we imagine others as human beings (Moore and

Sanders 2006:19). The latter indicates a critical study of the other, whereas Carrere and

Ingold are about understanding what it means to be human.

This question has been addressed in numerous ways in a wide variety of

disciplines. This research, however, started as I was contemplating the particular

suggestion of Ingold that we should understand the human being ‘not as a bounded

entity surrounded by an environment but as an unbounded entanglement of lines in

fluid space’ (Ingold 2011:64). This is a nice suggestion that opens up many possibilities

to imagine the world we live in. And yet, it did not appeal to me as a much satisfying

answer: I like to believe that I am much more than an unbounded entanglement of lines.

In this manner, the question what it means to be human turned into the question: Who

am I? What does it mean to be myself? This led me to another unsolved conundrum: that

of self and selfhood. Much research has been done on the notions of self and selfhood

and yet scholars have not been able to present a common answer to the question of

what they exactly constitute (see Harré 1998). Moreover, I realized that whatever

answers are given, they would never be satisfying simply because I believed that no one

else but me can tell me exactly who I am. The question of who I am is synonymous with

an exploration of being human, and therefore it should not be confused with a

solipsisitic analysis that posits the ‘I’ as a kind of a ‘What’: a woman, a student, a Dutch

citizen, et cetera.

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Initially, I started this research with a focus on salsa dancing because I believed

that this practice contained certain knowledge concerning the human condition, even

though I was not able to clearly articulate this knowledge (see Barbour 2011:105). Soon,

however, I realized that this was not the case. The practice itself does not contain any

answers to the question of being human; rather, it was through salsa dancing that I

gained insights into the ways in which I imagined the human experience. Whereas

scholars have primarily considered salsa dancing as a cultural expression, usually linked

to the construction of a Latin-American identity (e.g. Aparicio 1998; Boggs 1992;

Escobar 2002; Pušnik and Sicherl 2010; Román-Velázquez 2002; Waxer 2002), I aim to

show in this thesis that salsa dancing as a practice also offers inroads into conceptions of

the self. Salsa dancing became an entrance to this deeper research field of what it means

to be human.

Recall the quote above: ‘what we suffer from is life’. We are born as weak,

insecure, vulnerable human beings. From the moment we are born into the world we

develop a sense of self that is different from our surroundings. In this partitioning we

also partition our body from our sense of self: the body is what makes us vulnerable. We

therefore learn to embody techniques as a way to take care of ourselves (see Carrere

2006:167-197). For example, in the most basic sense, we learn to eat as to still our

hunger, we learn to wear clothing as a way to protect us from the cold; we learn to

communicate with other human beings as a way to create bonds that will make us

stronger or as a way to become aware of other people’s potentially harmful intentions.

As we shall see in this thesis, however, learning does not happen at random. Learning

involves struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement; and therefore learning ultimately

bounds us to the future as we hope to be able to apply the particular techniques, skill or

knowledge that we have learned (see Mahmood 2001:210).

Learning techniques is also a way to deal with our anxiety. The word anxiety

signals two complications: the first has to do with the body being understood in the

learning process as a weak part of the self. The second has to do with the wider

environment. Bauman conflates these two and argues that part of the human experience

is to be haunted by ‘cosmic fear’: being faced by the immeasurably great and powerful,

everlasting universe, we become aware of our weakness, vulnerability, and our

incapacity to control nor to resist the upheavals and elemental disasters of this universe

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(Bauman 2011:107). This fear seems to have been a constant throughout history

(Bauman 2011; Neiman 2009). Moreover, we also know ‘official fear’, that is, the fear of

human, man-made and man-held power (Bauman 2011:108). Fear is part of our

everyday life in various gradations. At this very moment of writing, I feel quite uncertain

and insecure. Have I learned enough in the past four years of studying anthropology to

be able to write this? I cannot help but to doubt it. Indeed, doubt is both a capacity and a

practice that is closely related to fear (Rapport 2007:258). As a way to deal with our

doubts and our fear, we learn techniques to safeguard our comfort in the future. Carrere

thus argues that our greatest fantasy aspires to the impervious quality of the

technological sphere: this indestructible realm represents our longing to be absolute, all-

powerful, limitless, omnipotent and immortal (Carrere 2006:168-169). In short, this

thesis offers an insight into the learning of techniques, in this case salsa dancing, as an

attempt to deal with human vulnerability and anxiety. In this research I began to

understand that salsa can be an attempt at mastering the body.

Besides a way of mastering what is considered the weakest part of the self, salsa

dancing also offered me an avenue to explore the question of being human open to

vulnerability. Our greatest fear builds upon the recognition that we are finite beings. We

have difficulties with death. As such, we have constructed imagined communities,

cultures and nations that ‘always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more

important, glide into a limitless future’ (Anderson 2006:11). In this sense, learning to

dance salsa in order to become part of a ‘kinesthetic culture’ (Samudra 2008) is a way to

seek avoidance of our finitude. The learning of techniques as a way to seek avoidance of

death rather than a way to take care of ourselves is problematic as it causes alienation

from one’s own being. Put the other way around, self-realization requires ever-widening

identification with the environment rather than a narrow, constricted sense of self that

is based upon one’s cultural membership (Besthorn 2001:31).

This thesis largely draws from insights in existential philosophy and

anthropology; in particular, from the work of Bateson, Bergson, Buber, Carrere and

Ingold. Their work has profoundly shaped the analyses and interpretations of the ways

in which I came to understand myself as a human being in and through salsa dancing.

Moreover, similar to Ingold’s essay ‘When ANT meets SPIDER: social theory for

anthropods’ (Ingold 2011:89-94), I have written this thesis based upon the metaphors

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and acronyms of a CATERPILLAR, a CHRYSALIS and a BUTTERFLY. These marvelous

creatures represent the ways in which I have learned to dance salsa over the past six

months. The CATERPILLAR stands for the idea that Cultural Actions Trigger

Experientially Responsive Physical Intelligence: Learnt Lived And Recognized

(CATERPILLAR). It represents learning to dance salsa as a process that takes place

within a cultural context in which various forms of knowledge are learnt, lived and

recognized. It is a process in which one simultaneously trains body, mind and emotions

to achieve competence. In the chapter of the CATERPILLAR, I analyze a salsa training as

a way to highlight some of the learning techniques.

The CHRYSALIS shows experiences in which I learned that I am able to transcend

the idea of the skin-encapsulated self. It stands for those moments in which

Consciousness Has Rejected Your Self As Limited, Isolated, Separated (CHRYSALIS). In

this chapter I first introduce my interpretations of movement. Then I continue with a

discussion of Ingold’s perspective on the human being as an unbounded entanglement in

a fluid space, Bergson’s notion of the consciousness as temporal movements in an

ongoing universal becoming, and Buber’s work on I-Thou Relations.

The BUTTERFLY emerges and flies around in happiness. It has escaped the Boxes

Used To Trap Ego’s Relations For Lamentable Yearnings (BUTTERFLY). That is, it has

fully realized itself as a being that is able to identify with the universe. This chapter

presents the Enlightenment conception of happiness, it elaborates upon a discussion

between Eros and Exodus as to emphasize the possibility of transcending boundaries in

our self-realization, and it explores Bateson’s notions of proto-, deutero and trito-

learning. In the end, however, the BUTTERFLY dies, because the self cannot ceaselessly

bolster itself with techniques. It, too, is a finite being.

The thesis starts with an exploration of the autoethnographic approach and the

settings in which I danced salsa in the ‘Interlude’. This interlude is followed by the

‘Exposition of the CATERPILLAR’, the ‘Development in the CHRYSALIS’, and the

‘Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY’. Finally, the coda of this thesis reflects upon the

insights gained from this research in relation to the question of what it means to be

human.

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Chapter one Interlude

An autoethnographic approach

In search of the appropriate methodology to conduct this research I came across the

autoethnographic approach. Various scholars who have done research on movement,

dance, or kinesthetic cultures, have taken an autoethnographic approach to research and

writing or have employed a method of ‘participant experience’ rather than ‘participant

observation’ (e.g. Barbour 2011; Goodridge 2011; Juslin 2011; Olszweski 2008; Potter

2008; Samudra 2008; Sieben 2007; Sklar 2000; Wacquant 2004). However, as Chang

(2008:56) notes, variety in usages of the label ‘autoethnography’ in different academic

disciplines has confused researchers as well as readers. This section seeks to clarify the

manner in which I employed the autoethnographic approach. Firstly, I explore

autoethnography in relation to research on movement. Secondly, I argue how,

paradoxically, this autoethnographic research has challenged a certain notion of self that

I previously held. I then continue with a brief response to the issue of subjectivity that

scholars have used to critique the autoethnographic approach. Finally, I present a brief

overview on the methods underlying my autoethnographic approach.

Research on movement

Drawing from my experiences in salsa dancing, I agree with Potter (2008:447) and Sklar

(2000:71) who state that heightened perception of the senses within the researcher’s

own body is vital in any attempt to understand the dimensions of movement. Samudra

(2008) has thus suggested the term ‘thick participation’ to designate a research method

that centers on sharing social experience in kinesthetic cultures. She argues for the

necessity of thick participation particularly as anthropologists ‘may be confronted by

practitioners who insist that the only way to understand them is through direct, body-

to-body transmission of their cultural knowledge’ (ibid.:667). Nonetheless, Samudra

considers thick participation as ‘cultural knowledge recorded first in the

anthropologist’s body and only later externalized as visual or textual data for purposes

of analysis’ (id.). This seems to imply that thick participation is primarily a method to

conduct research on those experiences of movement that we are able to able to

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communicate and to grasp intellectually. However, as Wacquant describes after his

participatory fieldwork on boxing:

‘The “culture” of the boxer is not made up of a finite sum of discrete information,

of notions that can be transmitted by words and normative models that would

exist independently of their application. Rather, it is formed by a diffuse complex

of postures and (physical and mental) gestures that … exist in a sense only in

action, and in the traces that this action leaves within (and upon) bodies’

(Wacquant 2004:59, emphasis added).

In this sense, to convey knowledge of salsa dancing requires one to immerse oneself in

it, to learn it and to experience it, and consequently to recognize that to some extent,

movement only exist in action. However, this version of autoethnography implies a self

that participates and experiences in order to write about others. As such, the body

becomes an object of study, a sort of notebook or recorder, a kind of instrument to

gather data about other human beings rather than about the self. This way of conducting

autoethnography seemed less apt to my research. The following section shows how I

have employed the autoethnographic approach instead.

Autoethnography and the self

In its broadest sense, autoethnography may be defined as ‘an approach to research and

writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience

(auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’ (Ellis et al. 2010). It is a

method that builds upon the connection between the personal and the cultural, or

between the self and the social (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Reed-Danahay 1997).

Originally, the term has been employed to refer to a study of the ethnographer’s ‘own

group’, thus relating own experiences to those of other group members (see Hayano

1979; Maydell 2010). Other usages of autoethnography define it as ‘a qualitative

research method that utilizes data about self and its context to gain an understanding of

the connectivity between self and others within the same context’ (Ngunjiri et al.

2010:2). It is the latter definition that comes closest to the method employed in this

thesis. I do not use an abstraction of myself, my body or my knowledge in salsa dancing

to study others or to study the connection between myself and others. Rather, this is a

study of the self as a human being. It is a study of who I am, what it means to be human,

in a context in which I dance salsa.

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The above definition of autoethnography already implies a certain understanding

of the self. That is, ‘to utilize data about self and its context’ implies a notion of ‘self’ that

is somehow separated from ‘others’ and ‘its context’. It builds upon my first intuition

that I both am a self and that I ‘have’ a self, which is a heuristic maneuver. This research

builds upon what Carrithers calls ‘moi theories’; theories that remind us of the relative

autonomy of our physical and mental human individuality that may be described

separately from its socio-cultural identities and relations (Carrithers 1985:237; see also

Rapport 2010). The moi is a transcultural phenomenon, as Carrithers has shown in his

research (id.). It is from this sense of a distinct and autonomous self that my research

started with. In chapter two, the Exposition of the CATERPILLAR, is based upon this

understanding while seeking to transcend it. So I started with the three senses of self as

identified by Harré:

To have a sense of self is to have a sense of one’s location, as a person, in

each of several arrays of other beings, relevant to personhood. It is to

have a sense of one’s point of view, at any moment a location in space

from which one perceives and acts upon the world, including that part

that lies within one’s own skin. But the phrase ‘a sense of self’ is also used

for the sense one has of oneself as possessing a unique set of attributes

which, though they change nevertheless remain as a whole distinctive of

just the one person. These attributes include one’s beliefs about one’s

attributes. … The word ‘self’ has also been used for the impression of his

or her personal characteristics that one person makes on another. (Harré

1998:2)

Ultimately, however, Harré considers these senses of self to be ‘useful fictions’ (ibid.:4).

As will become apparent in this thesis, this turns out to be also my experience.

Nonetheless, I realize in the beginning of this research, I attempt to imagine the self, and

myself, as a unitary field of body-mind-emotions. The body-mind-emotions triad is the

self that exists as a source of activities, as a subject of consciousness that persists

through time and as a human being with privileged access to experiences of own unique

states of consciousness (Fay 1996:30-33). I considered consciousness as ‘a being-

towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body’ (Merleau-Ponty in Jackson

1996:31), and the body as a living and sensorial entity by which and through which the

world is actively experienced (Desjarlais and Throop 2011:89). Here it is evident that I

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exactly did what I described in the introduction: I attempted to strengthen the body, the

weaker part of the self, by creating a unity of body and consciousness.

It was only through various experiences I had in salsa dancing that I gradually

realized that consciousness, my preferred term for a sense of selfhood under erasure, is

perhaps also something else than solely a being-towards-the-thing through the

intermediary of the body. In chapter three on the Development in the CHRYSALIS, I

explore the work of Ingold to show a way of thinking about human beings not as body-

mind-emotions or body-consciousness entities but rather as bundles of lines of

becoming. I also explore the perspectives of the philosopher Bergson who argued that

consciousness is omnidirectional and multidimensional movement in an ongoing

universal becoming. This work of selfhood under erasure is to constantly blur the

boundaries that the consciousness and others impose on it. In this manner, the physical

body is a mere temporal binding of the movements of the consciousness. In addition, in

chapter three I suggest that consciousness also exists of the ability to perceive what the

philosopher Buber called Thou-Relations: events in which we are confronted by a ‘Thou’,

that is a living relationship involving the whole being of each subject (Biemann

2002:175).

The perspectives of Ingold, Bergson and Buber challenge the notion of the self as

a separate body-mind-emotions entity. Or, as Buber put it: ‘There is no I as such but only

the I of the basic word I-You and the I of the basic word I-It’ (ibid.:181). Others and

context are an integral part of the self (Fay 1996:47-48). This is the CHRYSALIS stage.

Yet others, and here is the insight that is most explicitly made by Buber, are not there to

be usurped by my expanding self. They are not an It, but a Thou that eventually led me to

so see the fiction of self. There is relation, and I am and become continuously through

relation. This is Ingold’s bundle of becoming. The self as a fiction is further explored in

chapter four on Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY.

The issue of subjectivity and data procedures

As a method to gather data about others (as in the anthropology that is advocated by

Moore and Sanders (2006) in my introduction), autoethnography has been criticized for

its undeniable subjectivity, and some scientists have questioned the academic rigor and

methodological validity (see Chang 2008:54). It is therefore necessary to make explicit

that the subject in autoethnography is a heuristic device. It is not used to claim a

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scientific objectivity or a transcending knowledge or truth. Instead, through this

heuristic device it stays close to lived experiences (see Jackson 1996). There is thus no

seeking to verify researcher’s preconceived notions; for the quest is an exploration of

the human being and a recognition of the self as an abstraction or device. It is a

questioning of why we employ the self and why we have difficulties getting rid of it. It is

also a quest to understand alienation and how techniques can sometimes soothe our

anxieties or awaken us to the fragile finitude of our existence.

In this research I have gathered data in various ways. The prime research method

was, of course, dancing salsa. I went to various salsa parties, at least once a week; I

participated in dance classes at least three times a week; I participated in a one-day

bootcamp; and I visited four large salsa festivals that consisted of three days parties and

workshops. These festivals were the Amsterdam Salsa & Zouk Festival in February, the

Frankfurt Salsa Festival in March, the El Corazón Festival in March, and the India Fiesta

Latina in April. Over the past six months, I have kept record on my observations;

emotions, feelings thoughts, dreams and memories; conversations with others; notes on

movements, gesture and bodily development; and notes on research method, analysis

and interpretations. These data refer either directly or indirectly to my experiences in

salsa dancing. Appendix one includes an overview of research questions that served as

guidelines in the gathering of data. In addition, I analyzed videos of training sessions and

workshops as well as salsa dance videos and photographs on the internet. Inspired by

Fisher’s ‘take-home interview’ (2011:54-55), I also recorded four conversations with

myself on a voice-recorder whilst driving back home after a salsa practice. A great part

of this thesis is based upon data gathered through this method. Finally, it is important to

note here that, although this research focuses on the self, it also includes a number of

other human beings. I have adhered to the principle of informed consent and a few

names have been changed as to protect privacy. In the next section I will introduce some

of the settings in which I danced salsa.

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Dance floor settings

This section draws from autoethnographic details of the Amsterdam Salsa & Zouk

Festival, the Frankfurt Salsa Festival, and India Fiesta Latina, and an informal

conversation by way of introducing the context of salsa dancing in which I experienced

myself as a human being.

February 8, 2013. Friday evening, 10:30 pm. It is snowing outside, but inside it is nice

and warm. I have just entered the building where the Amsterdam Salsa & Zouk Festival

takes place. Whilst I am standing in line for the reception desk, I observe the other

people coming in. Some first take off their coats and bring them to the wardrobe. The

woman who entered after me has gone straight to the chairs, where she sits down and

changes her with snow covered Ugg-boots for a glittery golden pair of open-toe sandals

with heels. Out of her bag she grabs a small brush, which she uses to scrap the dirt off

the suede soles. I check my own bag to see if I brought my brush as well. The floor might

be a bit slippery, and brushing the soles will help to gain a better grip. Now it is my turn

at the reception desk. I hand over the printed e-ticket. The man behind the desk scans it

and puts a yellow plastic band around my wrist. He instructs me not to take it off until

the weekend is over. He also gives me an information brochure and shows me the page

on which the workshop plan is printed. I look at it and a rush of excitement flows

through my body. Super Mario’s partnering on1 and on2… Adolfo Indacochea will give a

pachanga workshop… Yamulee also partnering on 2… Magna’s styling workshop… This

is going to be a great weekend.

March 8, 2013. Friday midnight. I am standing in the corner of the 800 m² main arena of

the Frankfurt Salsa Festival. The hall is square-shaped with a high ceiling and a wooden

floor. The walls on the left and the right are covered with large, thick black curtains. The

disco lights that hang on the ceiling fill the hall with warm orange, red and purple colors.

It is a very open space, with a big stage in the front and a small bar in the back. The

dance shows on the big stage have just ended and by now the music is pumping out of

the speakers. “Ran kan kan kan, kan kan, goza, goza, goza con los timbales…”1 Most

people on the dance floor are dancing on2, although I also see some dancing on1. Most

1 From the song ‘Ran Kan Kan’, by Tito Puente (1954).

16

men are dressed up in jeans and shirt and shiny black or white dance shoes. Most

women are clothed in short dresses, high heels, with lots of make-up on their face. It is

fairly warm inside, so I walk to the bar and order a glass of soda with ice. The song has

just ended and whilst the DJ starts a new song, many people leave the floor to look for

another partner to dance with. Some leave the big hall to visit the other, smaller arena,

in which the DJ plays bachata, zouk and kizomba music. I tell myself that after I finish my

drink, I will take on an open body posture and will try to make eye contact with a

potential dance partner in the hope that I will be asked for a dance.

April 13, 2013. Saturday early morning, 02:00 am. I am talking with a young Sikh man

with a short, black beard and a bordeaux-colored turban. We met yesterday at the pre-

party in New Delhi. He asks me: “So what do you think of the dancing here in India?” I

smile. “It is very… similar to Europe. I guess that surprises me a bit”. He nods and smiles

back. The DJ has just started a new song, so he reaches out his hand to me as a gesture to

ask me to dance. I grab his hand and follow him until we have found a good spot on the

floor where we have enough space to dance. His left hand holds my right hand at the

height of my upper chest; his right hand is on my lower back and my left hand on his

right shoulder. The music hits beat one and we start to dance. He starts with a basic step,

leads me into a ‘cross body lead’, a ‘single turn’, a ‘cross body lead outside double turn’. It

takes about half a minute before we really connect; I feel like a puzzle piece that rotates

a few times until it finally fits the other piece. But now that we connected, we dance with

a very smooth flow in and out of the patterns. I am not longer thinking about my body

movements, instead, I am caught in the movement and all I can do is follow.

The concepts of Amsterdam Salsa & Zouk Festival, the Frankfurt Salsa Festival, and India

Fiesta Latina were quite similar: a minimum of two days, with workshops from about 10

am till 5 pm; dance shows on large stages from 10 pm till midnight; three parties from

midnight till early morning with salsa, mambo and cha cha played in one hall and

bachata, zouk and kizomba in the other halls. People dance on1 or on2 with similar body

movements and patterns. During the workshops people wear sports clothing, whereas

they dress up for the parties. The gender roles are the same: men ask women to dance;

17

men lead and women follow.2 Moreover, the participants, show dancers, teachers and

DJ’s have come from all over the world.3

Nonetheless, even though salsa has spread out through the world, the image of it

being a Latin-American dance remains. The very name of ‘India Fiesta Latina’ reminds us

thereof. However, one day I met Richard, an exchange student at the University Utrecht

who had come from a small town in Peru.4 When I told him about my research on salsa

dancing, he immediately started to complain that people in the Netherlands cannot

dance salsa at all, or at least, they do not dance ‘the real salsa’. He was very disappointed

when he went to the salsa cafés in Amsterdam. One night he had asked a girl to dance. As

soon he had started to dance, swinging his body and moving his feet to the rhythm, the

girl stopped dancing and told him that ‘he did not do it right’. He was supposed to stay

‘on the line’, and not to dance in circles, she told him. I could hear the frustration in

Richard’s voice.

The situation did not surprise me. Most salsa schools in the Netherlands teach

either the on1 or on2 style, which are indeed danced on an imaginary line. The schools

primarily teach students to dance patterns and combinations, whilst they pay little

attention to musicality, that is, bodily sensitivity to the rhythm, melody, and theme of the

music. The students thus often dance according to the rules and techniques they learn in

the dance classes and this makes it difficult to switch to what Richard would call ‘the real

salsa’, in which musicality is highly important. His argument reminded me of a politics of

authenticity that I had encountered often in the voices of people from Latin-American

origin, and through reading the comments on the many salsa dance videos posted on

Youtube, I realized that many people share Richard’s complaint.5 They have constructed

an idea of ‘the real salsa’ as consisting of certain body movements and musicality,

2 These roles are hegemonic but certainly not exclusive. I have occasionally witnessed men dancing with men, and women dancing with women. Similarly, women sometimes ask men to dance. 3 To be more specific, at these three festivals I met people who live in: Angola, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam. 4 February 19, 2013. Utrecht, the Netherlands. 5 For example, as a comment on a video titled ‘best salsa dancers in the world!’ someone wrote: “These beautiful and excellent dancers do not dance "Salsa" the way it should be danced. They do not move the hips, do the inflections, the syncopated turns, place the arms style, and Dime-Que-No's the way "Salsa" should be. That's is why they look like robots with no substance and the men effeminate with no hints of seduction, power or energy that this dance demands. The steps and turns are unnatural and forced. They should go to Cuba to learn how this is danced. They are not the best” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-jlFN7pMdw, accessed July 1, 2013).

18

especially of feet, hips and shoulders moving to the rhythm of the salsa percussion. This

is also what Desmond (1997:40-43) discusses in her argument that Latinness has

become a stereotype that lumps together ‘race’, ‘national origin’ and a supposed genetic

propensity for rhythmic movement. These movements seem to be lived and experienced

as a reality that confirms the notion of a Latin-American identity.

The salsa dancing that Richard and other people criticize, are the on1 and on2

styles that originated in Los Angeles and New York respectively. These styles are learned

in dance schools, where the mastering of guidelines, rules and techniques is correlated

to progress; pupils move from beginners-, to intermediate-, to advanced-level classes.

Most of these schools (yet certainly not all) maintain high prices and entrance fees and

tend to promote themselves as places with an exotic, Latin ambiance. It was all money

business, according to Richard. It had led him to distance himself from salsa dancing in

the Netherlands. Although I had been a bit skeptical about his argument, since the on1

and on2 styles of dancing seemed equally real to me, I could not help to shake my hips a

little bit more to the rhythm the next time I went dancing. I hoped that people would see

me and think: she is really dancing.

The conversation with Richard demonstrates how different styles of salsa

dancing may be juxtaposed and subjected to debates on authenticity. Moreover, it shows

that salsa dancing cannot simply be studied as part of a Latin culture that has

transcended geographical boundaries. This would be to deny the diversity in the ways in

which people dance salsa all over the world. In chapter four of this thesis I refer to this

debate in an encounter between the BUTTERFLY and a bee, albeit not in the expected

format of the politics of authenticity. As we will see, it seems that this debate is a

question of two different and clashing ways of dealing with anxiety through body

techniques. The debate has thus become part of my exploration of what it means to be

human.

19

Chapter two Exposition of the CATERPILLAR

The caterpillar is born in a world where trees grow chewy green leaves. The

caterpillar eats and she eats and she eats; her hunger can barely be stilled, and

those green leaves are oh so yummy! Soon, however, she experiences her first

dangerous attack by an enormous bird. The caterpillar sees the bird coming and

in anxiety she falls out of the tree. The bird follows in a quick plunge. The

caterpillar knows that she needs to defend herself, but how? She looks around in

dismay. Suddenly she spots an adolescent caterpillar nearby. She has spiny

bristles and looks rather poisonous. The caterpillar decides to try a similar

strategy. In a millisecond she tries to stretch her bristles - the bird approaches

with its beak already open - she tries again and… suddenly the bird changes its

direction and flies away. The caterpillar proudly smiles: she feels like a real

caterpillar with her bristles out. Then she slowly crawls back into the tree and

continues eating chewy green leaves.

This chapter explores a perspective on learning how to dance salsa as a process that

takes place within a social context in which various forms of knowledge are learnt, lived

and recognized. Here, the social context is what Samudra (2008:667) calls a ‘kinesthetic

culture’, an imagined community of people who share bodily skills and experiences.

Entering such a kinesthetic culture requires disciplinary practice and repetition through

which one learns new forms of body use. This may have a transformative effect on the

individual’s body, mind and emotions; and vice versa (see Goodridge 2011; Mahmood

2001; Parviainen 2003). Moreover, the acquired and embodied dispositions constitute

forms of practical reason, understanding and knowledge (Crossley 2005:7) as they are

inextricably linked to an interactional environment of objects and others (Jackson

1983:334). In this manner, the learning process is similar to that of the CATERPILLAR:

we slowly move through and in the world and get to know it as we learn how to respond

to other beings and to the environment. This chapter analyzes a salsa technique training

in which I participated as an exploration of what the CATERPILLAR stands for: Cultural

Actions Trigger Experientially Responsive Physical Intelligence; Learnt Lived And

Recognized.

20

The habitus of salsa dancing

How does one learn to dance salsa? According to Foster ‘dance consists of a shared set of

behavioral prescriptions that both practitioners and viewers can learn and modify so as

to discourse collectively’ (Foster 1992:365). These behavioral prescriptions include the

disposition of dancers in space, the characteristic posturing of the body, the relationship

of the steps to musical tempo, melody, and mode, the steps and their syntactical

arrangement, qualitative features of the movement, organization of touch, and distinct

features of male and female styles (id.). Salsa dancing may then be understood as a

‘system of durable, transposable dispositions’, or what Bourdieu called the habitus

(Bourdieu 2006:407). The habitus is a domain of practical activity, improvisation, and

invention that does not as a rule depart from common codes, habitual dispositions,

approved procedures, and accepted ground-rules, but is nonetheless situated in

historical, political and cultural conditions that set limits of agency and creativity (see

Jackson 1996:20). A related concept is bodily hexis: ‘a permanent disposition, a durable

way of standing, speaking, walking and thereby of feeling and thinking’ (Bourdieu

1991:69-70). In short, habitus may be imagined as a framework of possibilities, to which

the hexis corresponds in practice. Habitus seems to be a useful concept to describe the

field of dancing (see Doane 2006). It allows one to describe the process of learning how

to dance salsa as a process of learning how to enact the dispositions.

Yet one needs to be cautious here. It is easy to slip into the pitfall of describing

the habitus as a transcendent entity that anyone can learn to embody; to consider the

body as a passive, ideographic means to embody behavioral prescriptions; or to subdue

the subjective motivations in the learning process to the structural realm of the habitus

itself (see Farnell 2000; Jackson 1983, 1996; Rancière 2004). Such an account would

then fail to grasp an understanding of the practical ways in which individuals work on

their thoughts, body, conduct, and ways of being, in order to attain a certain kind of state

of happiness, wisdom, or perfection (Mahmood 2001:210). Consider, for example, the

following notes out of my fieldwork diary:

January 30, 2013

Pain! Tuesday night I woke up a few times because of a burning ache in my left foot,

particularly nearby the instep. The next day (today, Wednesday) I can barely walk, the

21

pain has reached up to my calf, like a burning muscle ache. I must have done something

wrong during the practice on Tuesday evening. If it is not gone by tomorrow I might

have to cancel tomorrow evening’s practice…

February 3, 2013

Lady-styling class with Jeanella, 21:00-22:30.

Lady-styling is so much different than regular salsa classes! I do not feel completely

comfortable. This has to do with the fact that I am continuously observing myself in the

mirror. I don’t like the clothing I’m wearing. I look so boring with my flat shoes and

glasses on. I look like a girl, not like a lady at all. Jeanella is standing in front and shows

us the steps and the body movements. We observe once and then we attempt to mimic

her steps. […] Half an hour later we practice the lady-styling in form of a small

choreography. I look at the other women, and at how beautifully they move. I see

Jeanella looking at me. Maybe she thinks I dance ugly. I’m kind of happy when the class

is over.

March 9, 2013

This morning [at the Frankfurt Salsa Festival] I participated in a ‘musicality’ workshop in

which the teachers particularly focused on the coupling of movement and music

perception. We learned to do both the on1 and on2 basic steps according to the clave,

the congas and the bass in a mambo song.6 Something like this: (see Figure 1).

X = Slap/tack

O = extended tone

P = Pause

R = weight on right foot

L = weight on left foot

Q = quick change of

weight

S = slow change of weight

6 The website http://www.salsabeatmachine.org offers a tool to hear the sounds of the various music instruments and to listen to basic salsa and mambo music patterns and rhythms. (Accessed August 14, 2013)

Count 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 & Clave X X X X X Congas X O O X O O Bass O O Steps on1 R Q L Q R P P Q L Q R Q L P P Q Steps on2 R Q L Q R S S S L Q R Q L S S S

Figure 1

22

I am very happy I took this workshop. It was a lot of fun. In the afternoon I also took a

lady-styling workshop in which the teacher focused on moving to the clave beat. In the

evening I danced and focused on dancing to the instruments. The clave and the bass are

my favorites. The conga is still a bit hard to hear in some songs.

March 21, 2013

Today at the choreography training with the show group Fuego I thought I was doing

pretty well. I danced the whole choreography and I remembered all the steps. Then

Ricardo told me: “Esmee, I can see you are doing the steps, but, you are not dancing the

steps. You have to dance them!” I am a little disappointed. Next week I will do better.

The notes show bits of the many moments throughout the learning process in which I

experienced pain, timidity, happiness, and disappointment. To include such subjective

emotions in an account on the habitus of salsa dancing without having to subdue them to

a ‘socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures’ (Bourdieu

2006:408), one needs to draw on a longer history of the term habitus that goes back to

Aristotle’s philosophy.

In the Aristotelian sense, habitus denotes ‘an acquired faculty in which the body,

mind and emotions are simultaneously trained to achieve competence at something’

(Mahmood 2001:215; see also Crossley 2005:7-8). It refers to a conscious effort to

coordinate outward behavior – bodily acts and social demeanor – with inward

dispositions – emotional states, thoughts and intentions – through disciplinary practice

and repetition (id.). In this manner, learning how to dance salsa is not so much a process

in which one learns to enact the behavioral prescriptions of salsa dancing; it is rather a

process in which one submits oneself to a regime of disciplinary practice and repetition

that may have a transformative effect on one’s body, mind and emotions (Mahmood

2001; Parviainen 2003). Moreover, the ability to learn how to dance is predicated upon a

condition of docility. The term docility implies, as Mahmood notes, ‘the malleability

required of someone to be instructed in a particular skill or knowledge – a meaning that

carries less a sense of passivity and more that of struggle, effort, exertion, and

achievement’ (2001:210). Thus, although the habitus is acquired as the result of

interaction between people (Crossley 2005:7), it is embedded in individual’s

motivations, emotions and actions that generate the learning process. To reiterate,

23

learning how to dance involves practical ways in which individuals train their thoughts,

body, conduct, and ways of being.

First intervention of the CATERPILLAR

The CATERPILLAR knows that learning involves experientially responsive physical

intelligence: she did not learn how to defend herself because she acquired a set of

dispositions; rather, she learned from another CATERPILLAR how to act in response to

what she experienced as a dangerous threat. She therefore recognizes that human

beings learn to dance salsa when they enter situations where other human beings also

dance salsa. She also recognizes the motivations and emotions involved, and the

struggles and efforts that cost these human beings to acquire the ability to dance; just

like it cost her effort to become a CATERPILLAR able to defend herself. However, she

does not know what human beings’ bristles, or techniques of the body, are like. In the

following section I will therefore analyze one of the salsa technique trainings that I

participated in.

Salsa technique training7

It is eight o’clock in the evening when we start the warming-up for our three hours salsa

training with Fuego. The instructors, Ricardo and Naomi, stand in front of a large mirror

with a golden frame. I am part of the group of twenty-two students standing behind

them, with our backs turned to the entrance of the studio. The dance studio is a large

rectangle room of about hundred square meters, with a teak wooden floor and three

chrome pillars in the middle that support the ceiling. There are no windows, only walls.

These are decorated with red, velvet-looking patches with a few small mirrors in

between. There are also other wall decorations; a mirror in the shape of a palm tree, a

banner of blue green and red neon-lights that says ‘Willem de Bruijn’, which is the name

of the dance school. On our right side in the middle of the wall is another large mirror

with a golden frame. On our left side are about thirty dark-blue chairs, seven medium

round tables with red table clothing, two white sofas and two smaller wooden tables

that we moved aside to create space to practice. In the left corner behind us is a DJ-booth

7 March 21, 2013. The Hague, the Netherlands.

24

where the instructor’s I-pod is installed and connected to the speakers that hang in each

corner of the room. It is playing an up-tempo dancehall song.8

The warming-up largely consists of body isolation practices in which we move

various parts of the body separately. We then continue with several practices that

combine the upper and lower body isolations, for example, we move both chest and hips

in opposite clockwise circles: when the chest is put forward, the hips are put to the back;

when the chest is put to the left the hips are put to the right. During this practice, the rest

of the body is kept still. After the body isolation practices we continue with abdominal

strength exercises and back extensions. Then Naomi and Ricardo move into the middle

of the studio. Ricardo tells us to ‘partner up’, so we quickly form a circle of eleven male-

female couples surrounding them.

Naomi starts with a reminder to place the body into its center. She tells us to

place our pelvis in the middle so that our back looks straight and vertical; to pull our

navel towards the spine; to pretend as if we are wearing a tight vest that we zip up all

the way to our neck; to push our shoulders to the back and put them down; and to keep

our head straight forward. “Now tighten your abdomen and make sure you keep on

breathing like you normally do!” In this position, Naomi tells us, we can use our balance

to speed up, twist, turn and spin, to dance low by bending our knees, or to dance high by

stretching them a bit. She adds that the placement of the body into the center facilitates

the dance as the two bodies can quickly respond to each other and follow each other’s

movements.

“Alright guys, now pay attention. We are going to do the following combination.”

Ricardo takes Naomi’s hand and nods as an instruction for us to follow them. “Start in

closed dance position. Basic… Cuban motion guys, Cuban motion! Come on now. Start

again. Basic… Cross body lead inside turn…” “Ladies don’t forget the pivot on 6-7!” says

Naomi while she does the inside turn with pivot. I am dancing with Waldert, a tall guy in

his forties. I follow his lead whilst simultaneously listening to Ricardo and Naomi’s

instructions. After the inside turn I am facing Waldert with the mirror on my right. I turn

my head to see how our dancing looks in the mirror. My shoulders hang a bit forward. I

straighten my back and push my shoulders to the back. Ricardo continues: “Lead the

ladies with both hands, give her a single turn into a hammerlock on 2-3…” I now look to

8 This paragraph may seem like an excessive summation. However, in chapter four, Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY, I will elaborate upon the concept of proto learning, which will explain the reason for this summation.

25

the left to see how Ricardo and Naomi dance; just in case that Ricardo comes up with a

term that I not yet know, or with a movement that I have not yet learned.

They teach us the full combination whilst we are mimicking their movements. It

is getting hotter in the dance studio and we are all sweating. Naomi tells us to have a five

minute break to drink some water. Most of us immediately walk to the chairs to sit and

rest a bit. After the break Ricardo continues: “Guys, in the final part of the combination

when you lead the woman to the front, you have to make sure that you use your left

hand to turn her whilst your right hand is on her hips so she knows where to go... I am

not seeing any one of you doing this. I’ll put on the music and we’re going to try it again.”

About fifteen minutes later we are dancing the full combination on music.

Dance techniques, muscle memory and kinesthetic responses

The first part of the salsa technique training was primarily designed to teach us to

coordinate and to control our body movements. The warming-up was to prepare the

body for the movement activity; the body isolation practices taught us to coordinate

multiple movements of various body parts; the strength exercises as well as learning

how to place the body into the center were ways to ensure control over our body. These

practices are typical features of dance techniques classes (Parviainen 2003:160-161).

According to Parviainen, the usage of the term ‘dance techniques’ embraces four

different aspects: movement vocabulary, style, method and skill (id.). This seems to

reason well with the ways in which Ricardo and Naomi taught us the salsa combination

during the second part of the training.9 The pivot, for example, is a term I did not know

beforehand. Like the Cuban motion, the pivot turn is part of the general style that

characterizes Ricardo and Naomi’s dancing. Their teaching method is based upon

reiteration of movement phrases (basic, Cuban motion, cross body lead inside turn etc)

as well as visual mimesis. Finally, by repeatedly imitating Naomi’s movements I became

skillful in doing the pivot turn.

Here, the acquiring of dance skills through repetition and imitation is linked to

the notion of ‘body-memory’; that is ‘a three-dimensional archive with depth of

9 The role of the instructor in learning how to dance will be further explored in the chapter of Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY. In this chapter on the CATERPILLAR I will solely focus on learning from others.

26

knowledge retained’ (Goodridge 2011:121). The idea of body-memory is well known

amongst salsa dancers. Ricardo would often encourage us to practice the movements at

home because in this manner we would develop ‘muscle memory’. Muscle memory has

also been described as ‘neuromuscular patterning’ that becomes part of our memory

through frequent repetition of certain body movements (Farnell 1999:353; Parviainen

2003:160). These movements may feel unusual or even painful in the beginning.

Eventually, however, muscle memory will allow the dancer to carry out these body

movements without conscious effort or attention (see Goodridge 2011:122). Here, the

idea of body-memory seems similar to Bourdieu’s bodily hexis, until one takes upon a

perspective that body-memory is not so much the ability to replicate movements as to

reproduce movements (see Ingold 2011:159). The ‘knowledge retained’ in body-

memory, then, is not so much the idea that dancers have knowledge in their body that

they put into practice, but rather that they know by way of their practice through an

ongoing engagement in perception and action (id.). Indeed, I cannot describe the pivot

turn as something that is part of the memory in my body; rather, I have grown

accustomed to move and to place my feet in a certain way in a certain tempo (what has

been called ‘the pivot turn’) as a response to the ways in which I feel the physical contact

of the leading partner.

In the second part of the training Ricardo referred to this sense of physical

contact as he instructed the leading partners (‘the guys’) on how to touch the followers

(‘the ladies’) as to guide them in a certain direction. Touch is one of the kinesthetic

elements that is of fundamental importance to dancers (Daly 1992; Potter 2008; Reason

& Reynolds 2010). Broadly speaking, kinesthesia refers to sensations of movement,

being derived from the Greek kinein (to move) and aisthesis (sensation). The term has

been used to denote an awareness of body position and movement by means of sensory

organs (both ‘proprioceptors’ and ‘exteroceptions’ that refer to stimuli received from

inside respectively outside the organism) that are distributed over the body’s tendons,

muscles, ligaments, joints, organs, glands and vessels (see Potter 2008:448-449; Reason

& Reynolds 2010:52-53; Sieben 2007:138). The kinesthetic sense has been put forward

as a sixth sense to the five traditional ones as it is integral to perception (Reason &

Reynolds 2010:53; Sieben 2007:138). Nonetheless, both Potter (2008) and Sklar (2000)

use kinesthesia as a term that carries ‘less emphasis on a specifically biomedical

understanding of movement and instead conveys a more general ability to feel the

27

motion of one’s own body and to adjust it in culturally preferred ways’ (Potter

2008:449). Besides touch, it captures elements such as energy, tension, relaxation, heat,

and gravity. The placement of the body is one important means to respond to gravity; it

allows one to keep balance during fast movements. Like muscle memory, such

kinesthetic experiences may become part of the body-memory (Goodridge 2011:122).

Through repetition, the follower partner may eventually acquire a sense of

responsiveness to kinesthetic elements.

Potter (2008:452) notes that the ability to perceive and control kinesthetic

elements is not solely a matter of coordination and control of the movements of the

physical body; it also applies to the management of emotions. Recall, for example, the

lady-styling class of Jeanella in which I participated. I felt timid, insecure and ugly, and

for this reason I was happy when the class had ended. I could not whole-heartedly

immerse myself into the training regime as I was more focused on my emotional states,

thoughts and intentions. At the same time, whilst I was feeling timid, insecure and ugly, I

also had the idea that I was moving timid, insecure and ugly. Indeed, emotional acts are

inextricably linked to bodily movements (see Crossley 2005:8; Milton and Svašek

2005:13). This brings us back to the habitus as an acquired faculty in which the body,

mind and emotions are simultaneously trained to achieve competence, as discussed

above. In the next section, I will elaborate upon the ways in which this training may have

an effect on the self.

The mirror and the self

The notions of dance techniques, muscle memory and kinesthesia are built upon the idea

that we both are our bodies and that we have a body (Crossley 2005:2). Put briefly, I can

say that I am learning how to dance salsa or that I am training my body to dance salsa.

As Crossley reminds us, ‘it is necessary to recognize this split as reflexive rather than

substantial in nature. It derives from our acquired capacity to assume the role of another

and thereby to achieve an outside perspective on ourselves, a process which generates a

sense of our being distinct from the qualities we identify with our self when assuming

this ‘other’ role’ (id.). This process is stimulated by the large mirrors with the golden

frames in the ‘Willem de Bruijn’ dance studio; and by the mirrors in the lady-styling

28

class of Jeanella. These mirrors enabled me to reflect upon my body movements,

clothing, and body posture.

The mirrors thus made possible the knowledge of oneself as well as a sort of

alienation: as Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately to

be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968:136). In

this sense, the mirror image does not seem to coincide with the lived experience that

confronts it (Crossley 2005:8). Moreover, recall my experience at the lady-styling class

of Jeanella: the very image of myself in the mirror evoked certain feelings that can also

be understood in terms of Goffman’s notion of performance, which he defined as ‘an

activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous

presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the

observers’ (Goffman 1959:22). The concept of performance does not build upon a one-

directional relation between an active performer (the I am my body) and a passive

observer (the I have a body); rather, they build upon a social and intersubjective relation

in which both performer and observer act. Techniques of ‘impression management’, to

employ Goffman’s term, are based upon what the performer anticipates to have the

desired impact on the observers. In turn, the observers need to recognize and

acknowledge the self-presentation as such. Research on audience experiences of

watching dance performances stresses that their impressions are not merely shaped by

the material and physical acts of the performance; rather, they link with wider personal,

social, cultural, and lived experiences (Foster 2011; Reason and Reynolds 2010). Here,

the mirror presents the individual as both an active performer and an active observer.

This idea allows us to extend the boundaries of thinking about the body not solely in

terms of I am my body and I have my body, but also as I do my body. The ‘I do my body’

is to recognize that actions such as salsa dancing may have a transformative impact on

the ways in which I think about myself. On this point I will further elaborate in chapter

three, Development in the CHRYSALIS, and chapter four, Recapitulation: the

BUTTERFLY.

Second intervention of the CATERPILLAR

The CATERPILLAR now understands that her full name, Cultural Actions Trigger

Experientially Responsive Physical Intelligence; Learnt Lived And Recognized

29

(CATERPILLAR), resembles the process in which human beings learn how to dance

salsa. They learn from other human beings, who are already part of the kinesthetic

culture of salsa dancing, how to respond to their environment. This environment does

not exist of trees and birds but of music, physical forces such as gravity, other human

beings that generate kinesthetic elements such as touch, and objects such as chairs that

the humans are generally indifferent to until they take a break from dancing. The human

beings thus gain embodied knowledge that is always experientially responsive. The

CATERPILLAR also recognizes the emotions that human beings may feel when they look

at themselves in the mirror. She wishes she could also find a mirror to look at her spiny

bristles! At this point, the CATERPILLAR is satisfied. She has eaten enough chewy green

leaves. She is fully grown.

30

Chapter three Development in the CHRYSALIS

When the caterpillar is fully grown, she makes a button of silk that she uses to

fasten her body to a twig. Then she slowly transforms. Her old skin comes off and

reveals the chrysalis: skin that is hard like a protective shield. During the next

four weeks the chrysalis hangs on the twig. From an outer perspective, it seems

there is little movement. One only sees the shield. Inside, however, the caterpillar

is in full development. Her old sense of self is slowly disappearing. She is

becoming a new body.

This chapter explores salsa dancing in relation to two perspectives of being-in-the-world

that challenge the idea of the skin-encapsulated self, that is, a separate “I”-ness bounded

by space/time constraints (see Besthorn 2001:26). The first perspective is based upon

Ingold’s notion that ‘the organism (animal or human) should be understood not as a

bounded entity surrounded by an environment but as an unbounded entanglement of

lines in fluid space’ (Ingold 2011:64). This notion of the organism could serve both as an

extension and as an interpretation of my experiences in salsa dancing in which I felt like

nothing but movement in a fluid space of sounds, lights, gravity, tension, touch, balance

and heat.

The second perspective is based upon Bergson’s notions of consciousness as a

one-ness, that is a quasi-universal body and as many-ness, an ongoing, dynamic,

temporal binding of movements. In this sense, consciousness is movement, an ongoing

universal becoming, whilst simultaneously movements slow down and concretize into

consciousness as well as into the physical body and other visible matter. From this

perspective, an experience in salsa dancing in which I felt like I was movement may be

interpreted as an experience in which I did not longer perceive the world in clear cut

separations of subjects and objects and instead experienced a loss of egoic boundaries

and a sense of merger with the universe.

The notions of Ingold and Bergson are similar in the sense that both reject the

idea that human beings are limited by the skin. Both also reject the existence of static,

bounded, inert matter as they seek to theorize life in terms of movement. Their notions

seem to diverge, however, as Ingold speaks of the organism as a continuous bundle of

lines of becoming, whereas Bergson theorizes organisms as temporal bindings of

31

movements into conscious perceptions. In this chapter I do not seek to privilege one

notion over the other; rather, I employ both notions in an attempt to understand events

of movement in salsa dancing in which I transcended the physical movements of the

body. In doing so, I will start with an exploration of an experience at the Frankfurt Salsa

Festival in which I felt that I was ‘just movement’. The CHRYSALIS resembles this

experience. It stands for an event in which Consciousness Has Rejected Your Self As

Limited, Isolated, Separated (CHRYSALIS). These events are closely related to what

Buber called Thou-relations, to which I will also refer in this chapter. Yet first I start with

the question: what is movement?

What is movement? (Part one)

The dance floor was a bit empty during the last evening of the Frankfurt Salsa Festival.10

I was standing at the side line waiting for the DJ to start the next song. Then someone

approached me to ask me to dance. It was a man with black, short-trimmed hair, a light-

brown complexion and friendly, brown eyes. He was wearing a bright blue t-shirt with a

cartoon figure printed on it. We waited for the rhythm to reach the first count, yet inside

of me I could already feel the energy and heat set in motion. On the sound of the clave

our bodies started to move. We connected, I felt it immediately. The music continued

and the man led me into all kinds of patterns and combinations, increasing our tempo,

turning the environment into a haze of warm red, blue and purple colors. My feet

followed the clave, shifting my weight on the bass, shaking my shoulders on the rhythm

of the congas. Everything seemed to connect – the movements, the music, the

environment, my partner’s body and my own body. In fact, the distinctions between

these had become rather blurred. I was not solely my physical body; my partner and the

environment had become the extension of my body as our tension, gravity, heat and

energy unite; we were the clave, congas and bass, occasionally we are also the piano, the

vocals, the maracas, the güird, the timbales, the bongos, the cowbell, the horns or the

trumpet; and we continuously became one movement after another in a seemingly

perfect sequence. When the song had reached its end, we returned to the side line.

Almost out of breath, I quickly went to the bathroom, grabbed my phone out of the

pocket of my jeans and typed in a memo: “Just movement.” 10 March 10, 2013. Frankfurt, Germany.

32

A few days later I looked at the memo again and I asked myself: what is movement? In a

book titled The Wise Body: Conversations with Experienced Dancers, a choreographer

answers this question with ‘the big four’: shape, time, space, motion (Lansley and Early

2011; n.p.) Yet the reader is left without an explanation of ‘the big four’. How are they

defined? How do they relate to one another? My field notes include an attempt to answer

these questions:

Shape and motion seem to be inextricably tied to a notion of space. Shape

describes the spatial attributes of an object or entity (e.g. the shape of a triangle).

Motion is closely related to movement as it refers to shifting positions or

directions of an object or entity (e.g. a wheel in motion). Potter thus describes a

sense of motion as ‘a dynamic sense of constantly shifting one’s body in space and

time in order to achieve a desired end’ (Potter 2008:449). Space may be referred

to as a two- or three-dimensional entity in which material objects are located or

in which events occur, or as a relationship between physical objects and entities,

or as a qualitative conceptual framework (e.g. a public space) (see WEUDEL

1989). What about time? Time is an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social

life (see Munn 1992). Durkheim divided this dimension into social, collective and

personal time (ibid.:95). Social time is a dimension that we attempt to grasp by

use of clocks and calendars as to measure social activities and experiences.

Collective usage of time aims to capture it into categories and to make it

collective; thus enabling us to speak of the historical development of salsa music

in relation to the construction of a Latin-American identity. Thirdly, we may have

a sense of personal time or awareness that we are temporal beings: we were all

born at a particular moment and we will all die at a particular moment. All three

different usages of time we tend to link it to a physical or imagined space: social

time is bound to a particular space (including cyberspace); collective time

captures social events into categories like culture, nation, gender or ethnicity;

and personal time is tied to the human body.

The above way of thinking can be depicted as following (Figure 2):

33

This depiction clearly shows that each of ‘the big four’ is somehow implicated in the

other and therefore they cannot be separated. Moreover, it reveals that in my way of

thinking, ‘the big four’ always refer to movement of an object or entity within a certain

space. This was a rather strange realization for my own way of thinking did not seem

congruent with my experience at the Frankfurt Salsa Festival: I had not experienced

myself as a body-mind entity moving in an environment: I was ‘just movement’. Again I

asked myself: what is movement?

What is movement? (part two)

In his essays on movement that are part of his book Being Alive, Ingold argues for the

need for a different understanding on movement than one of ‘locomotion with reference

to the rigid environment’ (Ingold 2011:12). Ingold’s argument is that movement is not ‘a

casting about the hard surfaces of a world in which everything is laid out [i.e. the rigid

environment], but an issuing along with things in the very processes of their generation;

not the trans-port (carrying across) of completed being, but the pro-duction (bringing

forth) of perpetual becoming’ (id.). This notion of movement is based upon the idea that

all organisms are ‘wayfarers’ who live their lives as unbounded entanglement of lines in

a fluid space that is the world in an ongoing process of growth, development and self-

renewal (ibid.:150-151). These lines are ‘lines of becoming’ with neither beginning nor

end, because a becoming is always in the middle, it is the in-between (ibid.:83). The

‘fluid space’ is a meshwork of entanglements of lines; a meshwork of ‘substances that

flow, mix and mutate, sometimes congealing into more or less ephemeral forms that can

Movement

Shape

Object or

entitySpace

Space

Two- or three-

dimensional entity

Time

Time

Duration, motion Space

Social, collective, personal

Motion

Object or

entitySpace Time

Figure 2

34

nevertheless dissolve or re-form without breach of continuity’ (ibid.:86). In this view,

organisms are becomings rather than beings. The world does not exist of a rigid

environment in which beings move about and across. Neither does ‘space’ exist as an

existing two- or three-dimensional entity in which all material objects are located and in

which all events occur (see WEUDEL 1989). Ingold would certainly reject this notion of

space as I described it in my field notes. Space, for Ingold, is the lifeworld: the world as a

meshwork woven from the entanglements of growth and movement of inhabitants who

are continuously becoming (Ingold 2011:141-152).

In various salsa dance classes, I learned that this meshwork may be described as

a combination of kinesthetic forces such as heat, energy, tempo, gravity, vibrations and

tension; forces that we may perceive through the senses but which are not clearly

delineable as part of the own body, other bodies, or the environment. For example, at the

El Corazón Festival I participated in a ladystyling workshop by Shelina Donkers, a

female dancer who is well-known for her engaging and energetic performances.11 She

started the workshop saying: “I do not move, I dance.” Throughout the workshop I got to

understand what she meant by this quote. With every movement she taught us, she

would first ask us to move according to the ‘blueprint’ of the body movement. For

example:

- Bend your knees a little bit, lean a bit forward with your chest, keep your hands

with your palms down and fingers straight next to your waist;

- Step to the right with your right foot on count 1, join your left foot on count 2, step

to the right with your right foot on count 3 and join your left foot on count 4;

- Step to the left with your left foot on count 5, join your right foot on count 6, step

to the left with your left foot on count 7 and join your right foot on count 8;

- Whilst you do these steps, roll your hips from the left to the right on counts 1-2

and 3-4 as you change weight; and roll your hips from the right to the left on

counts 5-6 and 7-8.

After the exercise, she would ask us to do it again, but then this time we would really

dance it: “let the music come into your body, use and breathe the air around you, put all

your energy and elegance in the movements… and feel it!” This is when I clearly felt the

difference between moving my body and what Shelina called dancing, the feeling of

11 March 30, Berkel-Enschot, the Netherlands. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40g7JV5089c for Shelina’s performance with her partner Randolph at the Israeli Salsa Congress in March 2012. (Accessed April 6, 2013)

35

movements both within and outside of the body. She added that if she would only teach

us blueprints for body movements, we would surely forget how to do them within a few

days, sometimes even within a few hours. Instead, she showed us that it is easier to

remember ‘feelings’. In addition, Shelina instructed us to extend our bodies and to dance

in a ‘cocoon’: to imagine ourselves stuck in a cocoon of air, and to use that air to move

ourselves. She then showed us the differences between dancing without a cocoon of air

(very small movements close to the physical body, hardly visible from a distance); and

dancing outside the cocoon of air (very big, uncontrolled movements that would bring

the physical body easily out of balance).

Shelina’s teaching method strikingly resembles Ingold’s philosophy. Shelina’s

distinction between moving the body and dancing is quite similar to Ingold’s recognition

that ‘it is not the butterfly alone that flies but butterfly-in-air’ (Ingold 2011:92). In

Ingold’s terms, Shelina instructed us to immerse ourselves in a kind of force field set up

by the sounds of the music, the currents of the air and other kinesthetic elements

surrounding us. We were dancers-in-a-cocoon-of-air: air is the material media that

allowed us to move and to extend our bodies. Breathing is the most obvious aspect

hereof: Shelina repeatedly instructed us during their classes to keep on breathing

(Recall Naomi did so too, see p.24). During a ‘spinning’ workshop at the India Fiesta

Latina another female salsa dancer, Magna Gopal, also explained that breathing is a vital

aspect of movement: if we hold our breathe, our body slows down and consequently we

cannot do as many turns.12 Besides air, forces such as heat, energy and gravity are also

part of the dancing: they both facilitate and constrain the dancer’s movements. The very

pores of our skin remind us that we are not enclosed entities but that we always live in

relation to the currents and forces around and within us. This is one way of recognizing

that human beings are not self-contained, isolated individuals.

First intervention of the CHRYSALIS

The CHRYSALIS emerges in a dynamic process of growth, development and self-renewal.

She still remembers the CATERPILLAR as the fiction of human beings as distinct selves

12 April 14, 2013. New Delhi, India. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iXDD2qxZ2g for a short impression of Magna Gopal spinning on stage at the Salsa India Festival in April 2008. (Accessed August 14, 2013)

36

who learn how to dance salsa. However, the CHRYSALIS knows that human beings, like

all organisms, are not distinct selves but rather unbounded entanglements of lines in a

fluid space. In salsa dancing, this fluid space is a meshwork of dynamic currents and

forces such as sounds, lights, gravity, tension, touch, balance and heat. In the CHRYSALIS,

this fluid space consists of currents and forces that are compactly directed within the

protective skin. The CHRYSALIS is therefore most preoccupied with what is happening

within the skin. Occasionally she pays some attention to the silk that attaches her to the

twig, but the rest of the world she simply ignores. From an outsider’s perspective it thus

seems like she hardly moves at all. This is of course but an illusion; a trick she uses not

to be bothered by anyone so that she can fully focus on her process of becoming a

BUTTERFLY. This trick easily works as the twig that she is attached to hardly moves

either.

Consciousness as quasi-universal and the notion of duende

The CHRYSALIS reminds us of another perspective on my ‘just movement’ experience at

the Frankfurt Salsa Festival. This perspective builds upon the idea that individuals are

capable of identifying ‘with aspects of the world and humanity beyond the body,

transcending the condition of separateness and isolation in recognition of the

interrelated unity of existence’ (Walsh 1984:459). Thus the philosopher Bergson argued

that ‘our body is not limited to the small physical organism we typically identify with

(although that body always remains the vital center of our world). We also possess a

massive body made up of the totality of our conscious perceptions’ (Barnard 2010:54).

This massive body is quasi-universal as, according to Bergson, our ‘pure perceptions’ are

not created by our brains but they are part and parcel of the world around us (id.). In

this manner, we are continuously connected to the entire universe. It is only by the

filtering mechanisms of the brain that we divide ourselves from the outside world, and

that we carve out static, physical and material objects as to create a sense of stability ‘in

the onrush of universal becoming’ (ibid.:55).13 As such, we tend to perceive the

CHRYSALIS as a bounded entity that does not move; it is only the being/becoming

13 See http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html for an insightful talk by the neuroscientist J.B. Taylor who suffered a brain stroke in which these filtering mechanisms failed to function and how she consequently experienced herself as an ‘energy being connected to the energy all around’. (Accessed August 14, 2013).

37

within that moves. The CHRYSALIS also co-constructed the twig as an inert, static matter

to which she is attached. In fact, however, both the skin of the CHRYSALIS and the twig

are very much alive and active in the sense that ‘the substances of which they are

comprised continue to be swept up in circulations of surrounding media that alternately

portend their dissolution or […] ensure their regeneration’ (Ingold 2011:29). Or, put in

terms of Bergson’s quasi-universal consciousness, their boundaries, too, may dissolve

into a universal, undifferentiated and unsegmented temporal movement. If this notion is

taken as an analytical perspective, then my ‘just movement’ experiences in salsa dancing

may be interpreted as experiences in which I did not longer perceive the world in clear

cut separations of subjects and static objects but instead experienced a loss of egoic

boundaries and a sense of merger within the universe.

Other dancers may have had similar experiences. On that same evening at the

Frankfurt Salsa Festival, I spoke with Super Mario, a famous social dancer who lives to

teach salsa workshops all over the world.14 Super Mario rarely performs on stage;

instead, he spends whole nights on the dance floor. Our conversation had started whilst I

was sitting next to the ticket booth near the entrance. Super Mario came to sit next to me

to cool off from dancing. We talked about the heat in the ball room, about famous

dancers and about flirting on the dance floor. He laughed and said: “Yes, I love dancing

but I also love women’s attention… and women love the attention too!” He laughed

again, but continued on a more serious tone: “But really, I love dancing. I don’t care who

my partner is. In fact, I hate dancing with someone I know, or with whom I already am

connected to. Unless it is an artist who tells me she wants to be challenged. But to be

able to connect through the moves, all I need to know about a person is how long she has

been dancing. The soon as we reach a connection through our moves… and then speed

up… well then I just trip. My mind goes crazy, amazing.” (Emphasis added).

A few days later I wondered whether I would have typed ‘just movement’ in the

memo if I would have had this experience after I had spoken with Super Mario. Perhaps I

would have instead typed ‘tripping’ in the memo, for our experiences seemed very

similar. A state of tripping may be described as an alternate state of consciousness; a

state that cannot be considered constant nor continuous. Indeed, I do not always

experience myself as movement: most of the time I experience myself as a body-mind

14 March 10, 2013. Frankfurt, Germany. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N12jYGWsHKQ for an impression of Super Mario social dancing, January 2012. (Accessed August 14, 2013)

38

entity, moving in an environment, visible to and observable by other people. In

Bergson’s terms, this is when the filtering mechanisms of my brain are fully active. Yet a

state of tripping also carries a connotation of illusion, hallucination, or of being under

influence of a drug. This is where Super Mario’s experience differs from mine. The

moment, in which my partner and I reached a connection through our moves, as to

borrow Super Mario’s words, it did not feel as if my mind went crazy. In fact, it felt like

everything made perfect sense: after all, I was just movement. It was perhaps not so

much an alternate state of consciousness; it was rather an experience of revelation. It

was a revelation of the world in which boundaries, subjects and objects do not exist as

such. It was a revelation of the world as an ongoing universal becoming. In Bergson’s

terms, this revelation was ‘the result of a profound contact with a deeper, but usually

unperceived, level of reality’ (Barnard 2010:56).

This perspective offers a possibility to take spiritual and mystic notions into

account as the results of contact with deeper levels of reality, without reducing these as

hallucinations or illusions. Here, I would like to briefly discuss the Andalusian notion of

duende. I first heard of this notion from another dancer, Colin, with whom I had been

looking at Youtube videos of performances and social dances. He had commented that

some of the dancers had duende whilst others did not. Although duende literally

translates as elf, goblin or fantasy spirit, the poet García Lorca used the term to describe

‘a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is alive, all that a performer is

creating at a certain moment … an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability, on rare

occasions, to send waves of emotion to those watching and listening to them … a

demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence’ (García

Lorca 1998:viii-ix). García Lorca’s duende is similar to Bergson’s notion of a quasi-

universal body in the sense that both allow us to conceive of human experiences beyond

one’s egoic, biographical or personal sense of self (Besthorn 2001:26). Whereas duende

in this sense refers to a passion in and power of a performance, Colin also used the term

in relation to social dancers, those who are not performing on a stage but dancing on the

dance floor instead. Nonetheless, the notion of duende is not widespread. I have heard a

few dancers simply say about other dancers that “he [or she] has it”, without clarifying

what that ‘it’ would be. Indeed, it seems that sometimes ‘it’ is there whilst I cannot know

or assert anything about ‘it’. In the next section I will therefore explore Bergson’s notion

of consciousness alongside Buber’s philosophy of I-It experiences and I-Thou relations.

39

Consciousness as movement and I-Thou relations

I am in the dance studio of Fuego. I look at myself and the six other women in the mirror

whilst we are waiting for Naomi to give us instructions.15 Ricardo has gathered the men

in the other corner of the dance studio. They have already started their exercises. Naomi

is standing in the middle of our group. “Alright girls, like I said, today we are going to

practice the movements of our hands. Let’s start. Keep your elbows near your body. Now

move your right underarm in small circles from inside to outside. Whilst you are moving

your hand outward, keep it flat, as if you are caressing a cat. Yes… like that. Keep on

caressing”. I look at the movements of my hand in the mirror. I cannot remember the last

time I caressed a cat. I’m allergic to cats. And yet here I am caressing a cat without

getting any allergic reactions. “Now, before you move your hand inside again, lift it up

and move your fingers in this way… as if your hand is a jellyfish.” I hear two or three

girls giggle, but I am too focused on my own movements in the mirror to pay attention to

them. “So we caress the cat… and then we move up like a jellyfish and then inside… cat…

jellyfish... cat…” I am starting to enjoy this exercise. It is quite relaxing. “Jellyfish… cat…

jellyfish… cat… jellyfish… cat…” Naomi is repeating these words in a low voice while we

all simultaneously move our hands. “Jellyfish… cat… jellyfish… cat…” I am not longer

thinking. “Jellyfish… cat… jellyfish… cat… jellyfish… cat… jellyfish… cat…” Suddenly I see

Ricardo standing next to Naomi in the mirror. “Ladies are you finally done with your

exercise?” I hear him ask. I now turn my head to look at the group from aside. It feels like

I just snapped out of something. I see one of the other girls, Melanie, blinking her eyes.

She then looks back at me and smiles: “Wow, I feel like, totally Zen!”

The ‘cat and jellyfish’ exercise significantly shaped my research in two ways.

Firstly, it made me aware of the movements of my consciousness and secondly, it led me

to contemplate the difficulties in attempting to grasp an understanding of an experience

that perhaps lies beyond grasp. According to Bergson, consciousness is an ongoing,

dynamic, temporal flux, which is omnidirectional, multidimensional and always

extending and renewing (see Barnard 2010:46). This stream of consciousness is what

Bergson calls durée. Within the durée one encounters qualitatively differentiated, but

unsegmented temporal movements (see Barnard 2010:46; Munn 1992:95). In other

words, consciousness is oneness and manyness: it is that quasi-universal body that

15 November 29, 2013. The Hague, the Netherlands.

40

temporarily differentiates in many separate conscious entities. During the ‘cat-jellyfish’

exercise the movements of the consciousness slowly concretized into my physical body.

That is, I was so focused on the physical movements that it generated a meditative effect

in which I was no longer distracted by other impulses. This is also what Melanie seemed

to refer to by her comment that she felt ‘totally Zen’. Yet simultaneously the movements

of my consciousness seemed to have narrowed down so much that the ‘cat-jellyfish’

exercise felt like a non-conscious, repetitive activity. When I ‘snapped out of it’ the

movements of my consciousness spread out again in all kinds of directions.

This is when analyzing this experience becomes difficult: I cannot describe what

happened between the moment that I stopped thinking and the moment that I snapped

out of it. The very moment I attempted to capture this experience, to make sense of it

and to communicate it just like Melanie did, it had already vanished. This moment in

between is interesting because it links Ingold and Bergson with Buber. It is a moment of

becoming (Ingold) and a moment in which I did not clearly discern myself from the

other girls and the environment (Bergson). Such in-between moments are part of what

Buber called ‘Thou relations’: events in which something confront us as a ‘Thou’ (in

Biemann 2002:175). These events are living relationships involving the whole being of

each subject. ‘Thou’ is not an object until we attempt to explain it: then it becomes an ‘It’

(or a ‘He’ or ‘She’) of which we can know many things and many characteristics (id.).

Then it becomes an ‘experience’; events through which human beings grasp something

knowable and assertable about the condition of outer and inner things (ibid.:170). Thou-

relations are virtually impossible to grasp and to communicate intellectually. The very

moments in which we encounter a ‘Thou’ reminds us of ‘the rest that what is’, of that

which cannot be theorized.

Second intervention of the CHRYSALIS

The CHRYSALIS now knows her name resembles ‘just movement’ experiences in salsa

dancing: these are events in which Consciousness Has Rejected Your Self As Limited,

Isolated, Separated. Both Ingold and Bergson have shown that the world is not a static,

harmonious environment inhabited by living organisms; it is rather a chaotic fluid space,

a meshwork of entanglements (Ingold) or a universal, undifferentiated fusion of

manyness and oneness in an ongoing flux of temporal movements (Bergson). Although

41

these experiences are partially Thou-relations that can never be fully grasped, it has

become clear that they generate a loss of a sense of self as a separate “I”-ness that is

limited by the skin. Just like the CHRYSALIS lost her old sense of self in the stage of

becoming. The four weeks have gone by quickly. The being within has transformed and

is ready to break out of the skin.

42

Chapter four Recapitulation: the BUTTERFLY

The skin of the chrysalis breaks. The metamorphosis is almost completed: slowly

the butterfly emerges out of the chrysalis. Her wings are still a bit wrinkled. She

inflates them with a fluid and lets them dry for about an hour. Then she unfolds

her wings. They are covered with scales that create beautiful patterns of black,

brown, blue, yellow and green colors. She uses her antennae to sense the wind

for air and scents… and then she flutters away from the twig. The butterfly flies

in freedom.

In this chapter I discuss salsa dancing in relation to happiness and freedom. I was born

in a current of time in which the world I inherited was not meant to be a place of

suffering; I was socialized with a belief that I have the right to pursue happiness. Here,

happiness is based upon the Enlightenment conception that human beings are happy

when they are active, when they are creating, when they are part of the world (Neiman

2009). Through salsa dancing I gain a sense of happiness because it allows me to

synchronize my internal movements ‘with the ceaseless dance of creative energy that is

life itself’ (Barnard 2010:46). In this manner I also gain a sense of freedom from what

Wilber called ‘the chains of alienation and separate-self existence’ (Besthorn 2001:28).

Alienation seems to occur due to self-identity and identification pursuits that are based

upon a narrow, constricted sense of what constitutes one’s self (ibid.:31). Salsa dancing

allows me to transcend this constricted sense of self. As I have shown in the previous

chapter, through salsa dancing I gain a sense of self that is movement in an ongoing

universal becoming. As such, I have moved away from a view of person-in-environment.

This is what the BUTTERFLY represents. She has escaped the Boxes Used To Trap Ego’s

Relations For Lamentable Yearnings (BUTTERFLY).

43

The pursuit of happiness

I am sitting in the metro with Natalia.16 We are heading to a salsa party at De Kroon in

the center of Amsterdam. Natalia knows about my autoethnographic research on salsa

dancing. As a way of showing interest as well as an attempt to exchange ideas, she asks

me what I love most about dancing. I tell her that I love the music, the ambiance, the

people, and the feeling I get from it. “A feeling of happiness?” She asks me. I nod. “Yes,

happiness.” We have now arrived at the city center and as we walk out of the metro

station, the subject of our conversation changes. Only after the party, on our way back

home, our conversation on happiness continues. Natalia argues that salsa dancing makes

people happy. Of course, this does not account for everyone, as she reminds me that one

of her best friends does not enjoy dancing at all. But the people at De Kroon seemed very

happy too. Or could this be a reflection of our own happiness? Eventually we agree that

at least for us, salsa dancing makes us happy.

The next day I am in the train to The Hague on my way to Naomi and Ricardo’s

salsa dance class. I grab a small notebook out of my bag to write down a few words on

paper that describe this feeling of happiness that I get from salsa dancing. By the time

the train has arrived in the Hague, I have created a small word cloud (Figure 3).

The word cloud shows the connotations that happiness carries for me. Yet whilst making

this word cloud, one question continuously repeated itself in my thoughts: why do

16 January 30, 2013. Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Figure 3

44

Natalia and I feel happy when we dance salsa? In search for an answer to this question I

came across the book Moral Clarity, in which the philosopher Neiman discusses an

understanding of happiness that can be traced back to the Enlightenment (Neiman

2009:150-176). She argues that one important achievement of the Enlightenment was to

set natural disasters apart from moral evil: philosophers like Kant, Rousseau and

Voltaire did not longer see ‘physical evil’ as punishment for or a result of moral evil

(ibid.:154-155; see also Bauman 2011:113-114). This was a way of disentangling

happiness from virtue. Before the Enlightenment, happiness was in God’s hands, nobody

could ever deserve it, and not everyone was going to get it. Yet the disentanglement of

physical and moral evil led to the idea that some people may get a fate they do not

deserve, and that some fortunes and contingencies ought to be changed (Neiman

2009:155). This conviction is still present in the 21st century: I was born in a current of

time in which the world I inherited was not meant to be a place of suffering; I was

socialized with a belief that I have the right to pursue happiness.

Yet when the Enlightenment philosophers proposed that the meaning of life was

not so much with God but with the happiness we may have in this world, the very

concept of happiness changed (Neiman 2009:175). It was no longer something that

befalls one; it became something that one does. We human beings create ideals that

cannot be wholly fulfilled and set out for horizons we know we will not reach (ibid.:166).

It is a strange paradox: we can feel happy because of something, but the moment we

come to expect this as normal then it does no longer make us happy. In this sense,

happiness is not about ‘end-state bliss’ (ibid.:165), it is rather a concept that is ‘always

on the move’ (ibid.:175). The pursuit of happiness has become part of happiness. Salsa

dancing is my way to pursue happiness. As the word cloud shows, when I dance salsa, I

feel active, alive, with energy. It gives me a sense that ‘everything-will-be-ok’; through

salsa dancing I let go of the stress of everyday life and gain a renewed sense of gratitude

for life.

The question of why I feel happy when I dance salsa thus turns into the question:

why do I feel active, alive, with energy, and a positive feeling that ‘everything-will-be-ok’

when I dance salsa? Bergson, whom I introduced in the previous chapter, puts the idea

of happiness in relation to the consciousness as the quasi-universal body and suggests

that:

45

‘if we can cultivate within ourselves an ongoing experience of the flux of

universal becoming, then our rigid and frozen perception of life can be

melted, and in doing so, everything comes to life around us, everything is

revivified in us. ... By attuning ourselves to the ceaseless dance of creative

energy that is life itself, we shall feel we are participating, creators of

ourselves, in the great work of creation which is the origin of all things

and which goes on before our eyes, becoming, therefore, conscious co-

creators of our world’ (Barnard 2010:46).

From this perspective, salsa dancing makes me happy because there are moments in

which I feel that I am not isolated within a skin-encapsulated self, that the boundaries

between the environment, my partner and I dissolve, that I am a continuum of

movement that in its widest sense passes into an universal ongoing of many-ness.

According to Naess, this identification with the wider universe is the maximum of self-

realization; that is, becoming all that an individual human being can possibly be

(Besthorn 2001:31). Conversely, a limited egoistic, biographical or personal sense of self

is the maximum of alienation; it may generate a sense of powerlessness, isolation, or

estrangement from society or even from oneself (id.). Both Naess and Bergson consider

reality to be a wide universal becoming, and to pretend that we human beings are

isolated, separate egos generates alienation and unhappiness. In this manner, happiness

means to be able to identify with life itself, to gain a sense that one’s place in the world is

movement. In the next section I will introduce the Eros and Exodus (Carrere 2006) as a

way to further elaborate upon self-realization and alienation in salsa dancing.

Transcending Boundaries

Carrere discusses as Eros and Exodus: ‘While Eros, reinforcing a primordial evasion,

strives to secure the organism as ever greater, unconscious of and untouched by

impoverished human actuality, the Exodus dynamic strives to transcend repression and

revive all that had been obliterated in the initial trauma of embodied self-awareness’

(Carrere 2006:169). Eros refers to a love for one’s self and body in recognition of its

weakness and vulnerability, which is possible through the acquiring of techniques.

Exodus is considered a counterforce to Eros: it means to embark on a journey that can

46

prove to be one of self-discovery and renewal. However, Exodus also entails that the

migrant is exposed to a state of disorganization; it possesses the power to put one’s

identity in jeopardy (ibid.:169-171). Whilst Eros refers to a technique such as walking,

which I have completely have mastered, Exodus resembles the learning to dance salsa.

In chapter two, I introduced Mahmood’s term of docility (p.22). This term offers a way to

think of learning as the acceptance of disorder, upheaval, and unpredictability. In

addition, as I demonstrated in chapter three on the Development in the CHRYSALIS,

through learning to dance salsa I lost a certain sense of self as a skin-encapsulated entity.

The above description of one of my salsa dancing experiences shows how my

consciousness was not bound to a physical body. Moreover, it reveals how I came to

imagine myself as immersed in the movements of my dance partner, in the music and in

kinesthesia. Such experiences led to a feeling of self-renewal; I am no longer constrained

by a narrow sense of self, I am able to identify with the wider environment and the

universe. In this sense, the struggle and effort in learning how to dance salsa have

turned into a way of self-realization.

Nonetheless, a migrant who embarks on Exodus may still come to meet the Eros

who have danced salsa all their lives. Recall the conversation I had with Richard in

chapter one Interlude (p.17-18). In this conversation, two ways of dancing salsa were

juxtaposed in a politics of authenticity. Both Richard and the girl he met were taking part

in these politics: Richard argued that she was not dancing ‘the real salsa’, whilst the girl

told him that ‘he did not do it right’. In a way, Richard represents Eros as he constructs

‘the real salsa’ as part of the Latin-American culture, whereas the girl resembles Exodus

as she has learnt to dance salsa only through transformation, that is, by taking classes in

dance schools in order to master the guidelines, techniques and rules of on1 and on2

dancing. Seemingly, both Richard and the girl have such a bolstered self that they feel

secure enough to argue that their way of salsa dancing is the right one, and therefore to

treat any other ways of dancing salsa as secondary. This is when alienation occurs. For

both Richard and the girl use their mastered techniques to construct a sense of self that

adheres to an always-been, ever-lasting cultural membership. Consequently, however,

this maneuver divides them into two isolated, separated selves. It thus alienates them

from their own finitude being as well as from the ‘relational total-field’ that they are

both part of (see Besthorn 2001:31). In this sense, self-realization can solely occur when

one learns to accept disorder whilst seeking to transcend boundaries.

47

First intervention of the BUTTERFLY

The BUTTERFLY is happily flying around until she encounters a bee with yellow-and-

black stripes and a scary-looking sting. “Hey... What are you doing here, Ms. Butterfly?

Are you trying to fly?” The bee asks ironically. The BUTTERFLY is a little offended:

“Excuse me but I am not trying to fly, Mr. Bee, I am flying.” “No, no, no” says the bee, “See,

you were not born to fly, you were born to crawl on the ground like a caterpillar! You do

not belong here in the air! I am the one who was born to fly, not you.” “Oh dear Mr. Bee, I

cannot but disagree with you” the BUTTERFLY replies. “No one is born to fly, Mr. Bee.

You have learned to fly because you were born into a bee-culture. Everyone in your bee-

culture flies and therefore you fly, but that does not mean that other beings cannot fly.

Culture is not ownership. But you are right to argue that I was not born into a culture of

flying. I went through a metamorphosis to be able to fly. Now Mr. Bee, you may argue

that I do not belong to the air, but if I would meet an ant, I am sure that it would tell me

that I do not belong to the ground either. And this is exactly why I am such a unique

being! I am an in-between, a being in continuous transformation. You are so preoccupied

with your identity as a flying-bee and with determining who can belong to your group of

flying-bees, that you risk alienation from the world. On the contrary, I am more

preoccupied with my self-realization in a universe in which everything is connected.

This is a vital lesson I learned during my period in the CHRYSALIS: to be able to become

all that I can be, I need to recognize myself as actively participating in an ongoing

universal becoming.” The bee is a little bit taken aback by this response. “I understand

what you are saying, but I am not completely convinced. I was here first and I did not

need to go through any transformation like you did. Either way, I am going to search for

some honey now. Goodbye, Ms. Butterfly”. And so the bee buzzes away.

Learning to learn

In order to further explain how I have found in salsa dancing a way to transcend physical

and social boundaries, it is necessary to return to the question of how I learned to dance

salsa. In the exposition of the CATERPILLAR, I argued that ‘learning how to dance

involves practical ways in which individuals train their thoughts, body, conduct, and

ways of being’ (p.23). What I did not elucidate on then was the role of the instructor in

48

this mode of learning. The importance of the instructor is best captured in the following

passage in an article of Bateson and Mead:

‘Learning to walk, learning the first appropriate gestures of playing musical

instruments, learning to eat, and to dance are all accomplished with the teacher

behind the pupil, conveying directly by pressure, and almost always with a

minimum of words, the gesture to be performed. Under such a system of learning,

one can only learn if one is completely relaxed and if will and consciousness as we

understand those terms are almost in abeyance. The flexible body of the dancing

pupil is twisted and turned in the teacher’s hands; teacher and pupil go through

the proper gesture; then suddenly the teacher springs aside, leaving the pupil to

continue the pattern to which he has surrendered himself, sometimes with the

teacher continuing it so that the pupil can watch him as he dances. Learning with

the eyes flows directly from learning passively while one’s own body is being

manipulated by another.’ (Bateson and Mead 2007:395-396).

Bateson devoted much of his work on the question of how human beings learn. In the

above passage, the teacher and pupil together constitute a system of learning. The pupil

does not learn to dance by the mere replication of movements; nor does it learn to

reproduce movements in various contexts. The pupil learns through interaction and

communication with the instructor.

In the exposition of the CATERPILLAR, I argued that learning how to dance salsa

cannot be a learning to replicate movements; this would be a learning of a ‘zero-kind’

that is fully genetically determined and an automatic response to received stimulus (see

Visser 2003:275). Instead, I explained how I learned to dance through what Bateson

called proto-learning. Proto-learning means that the context of learning changes.

Bateson also introduced the term context marker, which denotes a signal that informs an

organism that the learning context is different and thus elicit a different response (id.).

Consider, for example, the contexts of the three festivals in the Interlude of this thesis

and the dance studio of Fuego as described in chapter two (p.15-16 respectively p.23). In

the dance studio of Fuego I learned how to dance a combination that included a cross

body lead inside turn with pivot. Even though the dance studio consisted of all kinds of

objects and decorations, I learned to focus on myself and the movements of the other

dancers around me. Each time we practiced the cross body lead inside turn with pivot, I

aimed to reach perfection by following the guidelines, rules and techniques that Ricardo

49

and Naomi taught us. At either one of the three festivals, however, the leading partner

could lead me into a cross body lead inside turn with pivot, and yet I would respond to

the lead differently because I have immersed myself into the kinesthesia of the music,

the lights, the ambiance, and the interaction between people. This, however, is not to say

that context markers are tied to the environment in which I dance; if I would dance at

the festival with a conscious image of the dance studio of Fuego and of Naomi and

Ricardo teaching, then I am likely to reach for perfection of the movements in the cross

body lead inside turn.

In proto-learning, I would feel happy when I achieve competence in the

coordination of outward behavior with inward dispositions in various contexts.

However, we have seen that happiness in salsa dancing entails for me not so much a

feeling of achievement but rather a feeling of being active, alive, and a feeling that

‘everything-will-be-ok’. This kind of happiness is related to another level of learning, or

what Bateson called deutero-learning. Deutero-learning refers to the interaction and

communication between instructor and pupil as described in the above passage. Here,

the relationship between instructor and pupil does not exist of two individuals who are

related as instructor-pupil; rather, the relationship is immanent in the exchange of the

messages. Visser explains that ‘deutero-learning implies the learning of characteristic

patterns of contingency, or contexts of conditioning, in a relationship. … First, a message

sent by one person sets the context for a certain class of response by the other person.

Second, insofar as such messages are verbal, the nonverbal signs in an interaction

function as a context marker of the verbal message, therefore as a “context of context”

for the other person’ (Visser 2003:275-276). It is in deutero-learning that a feeling of

happiness as being active, alive, and co-creating the world is most present.

Proto-learning and deutero-learning are based upon the learning of techniques.

We human beings learn because we are born as creatures that do not have all its abilities

ready. Of this we were reminded in the conversation of the butterfly and the bee. We are

weak beings who learn techniques as to feel less weak in the bolstering of our sense of

self. However, if deutero-learning would reach its highest point, I would gain such a

freedom that I do no longer need a sense of self based on technical mastery. This is the

rare level of Bateson’s trito-learning that refers to the learning of deutero-learning: it

learns to recognize the context of the context of proto-learning (Visser 2003:276). In

trito-learning, a being needs to let go of whatever deutero-learning it was busy with

50

because it learns that other beings are not selves but contexts that the self can tie into to

make the self even larger. Yet when the self enlarges and thus dissolves into contexts, it

is no longer the reality it used to be. The maximum of self-realization thus necessarily

requires the abandonment of a sense of self. Or, as Bateson put it, the self is ‘a ladder

useful in climbing but perhaps to be thrown away or left behind at a later stage’

(Bateson 2002:126).

The second intervention of the BUTTERFLY

The BUTTERFLY enjoyed a long life in which she gained many insights. As a

CATERPILLAR, she learned how to dance salsa. In the CHRYSALIS, she experienced

herself as connected to the wider universe. As a BUTTERFLY, she found happiness at the

maximum of her self-realization. She has transcended categorical boundaries and has

lived in full freedom. But now… it has been only two weeks ago since she emerged out of

the CHRYSALIS, and yet she is already feeling weak. Her antennae have stopped

working. She is exhausted. Her wings start to falter. She knows what is coming and

closes her eyes. Then she falls to the ground.

51

Chapter five Coda

The question of what it means to be human is an iceberg of which this thesis reveals

solely the tip. Throughout my life I will continue to explore this question. The past six

months of autoethnographic research on this question have profoundly influenced the

ways in which I think about being human, the idea of me being a self, and the notion of

selfhood. Looking back at Ingold’s suggestion that the human being should be

understood as an ‘unbounded entanglement of lines in fluid space’, I realized that this

notion entails that the self dissolves into context. That means that my idea of being a self

also dissolves, as well as everything I was taught about humanity. Perhaps this was why

it did not appeal to me as a satisfying answer to the question of what it means to be

human: at the beginning of the research I had a strong sense of self as both an entity and

a reality. Yet Ingold’s perspective remained fascinating me. I therefore decided to give it

a try. In other words, I decided to gradually let go of what I thought human beings,

myself, and selfhood to be. I did so through deep reflection upon my experiences in salsa

dancing, and through allowing salsa dancing to alter my thinking.

Slowly my cherished notions of myself, selfhood, and humanity appeared much

more difficult to sustain. In salsa dancing I experienced a sense of self that was not

limited by the skin and therefore no longer a bounded entity. This has had consequences

for how I conceived the self, but also how I imagined other human beings. Suddenly we

were not separate and distinct anymore. We were relations who deluded ourselves into

thinking that we were separate. These moments in which I experienced relation as a

reality of life I have come to understand as Thou-relations, through the work of Buber. It

seems that these Thou-relations are a vital part of our everyday life. If the objective of

anthropology is indeed to grasp an understanding of human being and knowing, as

Ingold argued, then we need to think of ways in which to take these Thou-relations into

account without reducing them to It-experiences. Throughout this research I began to

understand that one way to do so is through thinking the question of learning anew. The

work of Bateson offered some useful insights here. His notion of trito-learning shares an

affinity with Buber’s I-Thou relations and Ingold’s proposition of what the human being

is. It seems that even within proto-learning, which is in effect based on I-It, there is

already a presence of I-Thou. This presence can be allowed to further develop through

52

deutero-learning, which is I-It at its maximum, thus leading to trito-learning, into

relation, into I-Thou. I have sought to convey this through the metaphors and acronyms

of the CATERPILLAR, CHRYSALIS, and BUTTERFLY in relation to dancing salsa. The

breaking open of the CHRYSALIS is the moment of transition to I-Thou relations.

However, in the end the BUTTERFLY dies. Its conversation with Mr. Bee already offers

hints as to why this happens: in her response the BUTTERFLY speaks in I-it terms,

thereby revealing her role as instructor in proto-learning. She has experienced Exodus,

which he has not.

However, the notions of Bateson, Buber and Ingold imply total equity and tend to

work towards improving all social relations. This is done if the BUTTERFLY recognizes

that her Exodus was not complete; if it was complete then Mr. Bee would not have been

addressed in It-terms and she would not have felt a need to defend the kinesthetic

culture that shaped her life. The irony is thus that the BUTTERFLY’s identity as a salsa

dancer may be just another social and cultural identity she privileges. Perhaps the self is

a necessary fiction in the inevitability of working through I-it experiences to come to I-

Thou relations. This would be my current answer to the question of what it means to be

human.

53

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Appendix one Guidelines in Data Gathering

1. Questions on embodied knowing and dancing

- What movements and gestures characterize the manners in which I dance?

- How does my body respond to and depend on the movements of others?

- How does my body respond to and depend on the environment?

- How do I accumulate an embodied knowing how to move?

- Who and what teaches me how to dance?

- How do I practice dancing?

2. Questions on sensorial perception and dancing

- What do I see, hear, smell, feel and experience while dancing?

- What classifications do I make according to what I perceive through the senses?

- How do I recall, remember, or think about sensorial experiences?

- How do I associate my sensorial perceptions with other experiences, in particular

related to the social and cultural context in which I find myself?

- What situations raise my awareness of the interdependency of my senses; for

example, when do I see what I already feel?

- How are my senses shaped by embodied knowing; how do I see, hear, smell and feel

what others have taught me to see, hear, smell and feel?

3. Questions on dancing and language

- When and how do I talk about the movements and gestures of the dance?

- How do I talk about styles and technique of dancing?

- When and how do I talk about the sociohistorical and cultural context of salsa

dancing?

- When and how do I talk about the context in which I am dancing?

- What words can I find to describe my experiences, movements, emotions and

perceptions?

- How do I discuss my experiences, movements, emotions and perceptions of dancing

with other dancers?

- How do I discuss my experiences, movements, emotions and perceptions of dancing

with non-dancers?

4. Questions on the relation between myself and others

- What do I notice about the others I am dancing with?

- What do my senses tell me about the others?

- How do I classify that sensorial data about the others?

60

- How does the way I see, hear, smell and feel others depend on how they are moving

in the dance?

- How are my experiences, movements, emotions and perceptions shaped by those of

others?

- How does my understanding of other dancers depend on the environment, or on the

social and cultural context in which I find myself?

- How do my performances of researcher, anthropologist, observer, ‘social dancer’,

‘show dancer’, or ‘student of salsa dance’ shape my understanding of others?

- How do others understand, describe and respond to my performances?